PSU 1:1 Pre-Conference Session

CFF Administrators

Planning Wiki



Curtis Griffin's Hatboro-Horsham site
  • Thanks for the link. I've bookmarked them in Delicious, and tagged them all with adminplanningpa. If you have other web-based resources related to 21st century skills/learning/schools or any other edu2.0 stuff, if you tag them on Delicious with adminplanningpa, then they should show up on this page.


Admin Pre-Conference 1:1
April 27, 2009

Full Day workshop

Audience: CFF Admin: Technology Directors, Superintendents, Principals and Central Office Staff

Objectives:
- Build Community
  • State wide and
  • within the school and
  • parent community

- Help Administrators understand how they can be more supportive of changes happening in their schools: technically, instructionally, policy-wise
  • Three things
    • How does it change the classroom for the better?
    • How does it change the school for the better?
    • How does it change relationships with stakeholders for the better?
  • We need common definitions (technology, 21st century skills)

- Help Administrators know what to look for in classrooms
  • What does it look like?
    • Depends on what you value
    • For CFF -- 21st century skills
    • problem solving
    • inquiry
    • responsibility for learning
  • Strategies for professional development

- Sustainability:
Vision, tech support, equipment, professional development
• It’s the leader’s vision that often keeps things going -- and the problem is when the leader goes.
• Include a change model


Team:
David Warlick - external catalyst
Ron Sofo - superintendent - Freedom Area - merging all initiatives towards common goals
Curtis Griffin - Asst superintendent - systems thinking, professional development
Chris Lehman - Principal - supporting teachers
Ron Meisberger - Technology director - providing tech support, infrastructure, policies
Jim Gates - PDE Coach Mentor

Format:
Overall presentations
  • If there is to be a vision building, shock affect, opening keynote, it might be interesting and useful to have the CFF coaches present and have them chat (anonymously) in Knitter (or some such tool). Then we could make the transcript available to the leaders so that they can see the reactions and insights from the classroom perspective and then discuss and build on that. Then we would let Knitter (or more structured tool like at Educon) available to the leaders for the rest of the day.

Panel

Discussion

Table groups

Final product(s)
• What can you do tomorrow? (what wold it take)
• What can you do in the next year? (what would it take)
• What can you do in five years? (what would it take)


  • It occurred to me, as we were talking the other day, that a wiki page with resources would be very useful to administrators as they return to their districts and schools. But finding resources is not the greatest challenge that they face. The great challenge, I think, is going back and telling the story -- having a story that they can tell their teachers/principals/parents that convinces them that there is no other choice but to pursue new visions of education.

  • I don't know if this is even possible, but might we some how end out with a "Did You Know" style video that ed leaders can take back to their schools. Might we, as one of the on-going activities of the day, ask them to jot down one line facts, action items, shockers, tear-jerkers, etc. that could be combined with images to make a video. One of the activities might be to take the one-liners and work in teams to arrange them into a logical order. These discussions would help them to wrap their minds around the concepts and the implications. We could send them the video and also the source slide deck so that they could customize (very 2.0).

  • I think that if this could be pulled off, it would be something that would be very useful to them, not only in giving them a tool, but helping to solidify their own vision.

To share with whole CFF community
Action steps?
Topics to consider

Note:
Coaches will be also meeting in a day-long pre-conference session the same day. Are there some possible joint activitieis?